After going through a bunch of static site generators ([pelican](https://blog.getpelican.com/), [hugo](https://gohugo.io), [vite](https://github.com/icyphox/vite)), I decided to roll my own. If you are more of the 'show me the code' kinda guy, [here](https://github.com/nerdypepper/site) you go. **Text formatting**: I chose to write in markdown, and convert to html with [lowdown](https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/). **Directory structure**: I host my site on GitHub pages, so `docs/` has to be the entry point. Markdown formatted posts go into `posts/`, get converted into html, and end up in `docs/index.html`, something like this: ``` posts=$(ls -t ./posts) # chronological order! for f in $posts; do file="./posts/"$f # `ls` mangled our file paths echo "generating post $file" html=$(lowdown "$file") echo -e "html" >> docs/index.html done ``` **Assets**: Most static site generators recommend dropping image assets into the site source itself. That does have it's merits, but I prefer hosting images separately: ``` # strip file extension ext="${1##*.}" # generate a random file name id=$( cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 2 | head -n 1 ) id="$id.$ext" # copy to my file host scp -P 443 "$1" emerald:files/"$id" echo "https://files.nerdypepper.tech/$id" ``` **Templating**: [`generate.sh`](https://github.com/NerdyPepper/site/blob/master/generate.sh) brings the above bits and pieces together (with some extra cruft to avoid javascript). It uses `sed` to produce nice titles from the file names (removes underscores, title-case), and `date(1)` to add the date to each post listing!